This blog began in 2007, focusing on anthrax vaccine, and later expanded to other public health and political issues. The blog links to media reports, medical literature, official documents and other materials.

Let me make clear, I do not condone rape. This case interests me simply because it was handled so differently from the usual case of diplomats gone wrong, such as in a vehicular homicide, or the aforementioned incident in Pakistan. Who denied Strauss-Kahn the niceties that normally accompany his position, and why? That is the interesting question here, and media have failed to ask it.

The April 11, 2011 Washington Post had an interesting piece about new directions at the IMF, led by DSK. One has to wonder if this helped lead to the crisis in which DSK now finds himself, entirely stripped of dignity, being tortured (a la Bradley Manning, who was put on suicide watch as a way to enhance his psychological torture--with clothes and personal items removed, lights on 24/7) and pilloried around the world. Read the following and see the threat he posed to the banks that now own and run our little planet.

Since the Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers failed more than two years ago, bringing the global economy to the brink of collapse, countries have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up their markets, intensified regulation of financial companies and deepened government involvement in the economy.

For International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the job is only half done, as he has been leading the fund through a fundamental rethinking of its economic theory. In recent remarks, he has provided a broad summary of the conclusions: State regulation of markets needs to be more extensive; global policies need to create a more even distribution of income; central banks need to do more to prevent lending and asset prices from expanding too fast.

“The pendulum will swing from the market to the state,” Strauss-Kahn said in an address at George Washington University last week. “Globalization has delivered a lot . . . but it also has a dark side, a large and growing chasm between the rich and the poor. Clearly we need a new form of globalization” to prevent the “invisible hand” of loosely regulated markets from becoming “an invisible fist.”
The effort to recast global economics will be a focus of IMF meetings this week...

The growing income gap between the rich and poor is no longer seen by many inside the IMF as a by-product of economic boom times but a cause of crisis, as poor and middle-income families turn to borrowed money to make up for stagnant incomes.

Strauss-Kahn continues to push for major new financial sector taxes, although that issue has never gained broad support. He has been frustrated as well in advocating an international program to ensure that the most globally connected financial firms can be put out of business if needed without costing taxpayers. That would require a deeper level of cooperation among nations than exists...

The IMF has also revised its long-standing opposition to “capital controls“ and researching ways that nations could control risky behavior by financial firms.
Strauss-Kahn — who is in the fourth year of a five-year term at the IMF and is being mentioned as a possible Socialist Party candidate in upcoming French presidential elections — said any suggestion that the fund is pushing for too much government is off the mark. The financial crisis is evidence, he said.“There is a long way to go before all that has been badly done by the lack of supervision of the market will be overcome,” he said. “The whole public sphere has to do more.”

2 comments:

Dirty tricks are part of the Fund. The Ph.D. staff of the Fund is primarily from US schools. US econ profs also play a large role there. Some do their 18 month tours there.

They also play an important role in the US government to supervise the Fund. The Undersecretary for International Affairs at the Treasury is a position often held by an econ Ph.D. or econ prof.

Foreign countries get embarrassing information on the academic history of the American profs and the econ departments. This includes Russia, China, India and Pakistan playing that game.

The treatment of the biology Ph.D.'s and M.D.'s in the anthrax case, Thomas C. Butler, Steven Kurtz, etc. has been noticed as what can happen.

The econ profs also play an important role at the DOJ. The Economic Analysis Group of the antitrust division of DOJ has 50 econ Ph.D.'s headed by an econ prof for 18 month tours.

Russia got over 20 billion dollars in IMF loans in the 1990's and those were all controlled at IMF and US Treasury by American econ profs on loan from US universities.

DSK is an econ prof from France. The econ profs in France are aware of much of this.

The US v. Microsoft case had involvement of such econ profs as DAAG, expert witnesses on both sides. In Europe, they kept on with the antitrust action against Microsoft unlike the US where it was dropped.

Econ profs and law profs are very close. J.D. econ Ph.D.'s have clerked for several judges especially ones with antitrust expertise. 4 have been at the Supreme Court.

The universities involved in this have little overlap with the biology Ph.D.'s and M.D.'s messed over by DOJ/FBI. Thomas C. Butler was Texas Tech. Steven Kurtz was SUNY Buffalo. These biology or art profs at low ranked schools have no way of finding out the inside gossip on econ profs at IMF, US Treasury, Fed, CEA, FTC or Antitrust Division of DOJ.

Joel Brenner was an antitrust trial lawyer at DOJ who was promoted to head of counter intelligence. He then said Russia was working at cold war levels to spy on America but on personal information not technical information.

US v. Harvard, Shleifer and Hay is an interesting case in this regard.

Ed Lake and the FBI have both said that their case against Ivins is primarily based on his behavior towards women.

Whatever the case of the charges against DSK, it is now established that DSK's behavior towards women was worse than Ivins.

So the FBI and Ed should be willing to switch to saying DSK did the anthrax attacks.

Some of the attacks were in NYC so they can just tack on the charges. This also gives them a fall back in case the current charges don't pan out. That way they avoid embarrassment, which is the primary basis of guilt of any suspect.

After swimming with dolphins at Key Largo, they checked me out at the edge of the pool

Visiting a Bhutanese Dzong, the regional seat of both government and religion (and a fort for good measure)

Why am I blogging?

Because life is meant to be lived! The left side of this blog has photos of some peak experiences. And the right side contains information about which I am passionate.

Too many peoples' lives are characterized by lack of authenticity, and fear of acknowledging and expressing their true nature. Employees cannot say what they think at work, and in the corporate system we must squish ourselves into square holes when we are round pegs. We thus lose touch with our souls, becoming cogs in a soulless, profit-driven machine.

The culture of political correctness has meant, in medicine, that we ignore how the foundations of our science are being undermined by commercialism. Clinical data generated or presented by the manufacturers of drugs, vaccines and devices cannot be trusted: there are hundreds of studies proving this. But this fraudulent information continues to be the only data informing the approval of vaccines, drugs and devices.

Unless scrupulous ethical conduct is demanded of physicians and biological scientists, our lack of meaningful standards will carry the medical-pharmaceutical system down the path of increasing irrelevance.

Medicine and its tools need to be affordable. The current medical-industrial milieu, characterized by contempt for science, countless ways for insiders to achieve wealth due to failure of good governance, and regulatory agency-to-industry revolving doors, has ushered in stratospheric pricing... further kicking us down that path to irrelevance.

Why is our new health care plan a giveaway to health industries instead of to health consumers? Why won't it cover all Americans? Why was the "public option" never an option for the Obama administration? Why did the promised Trump health plan evaporate the moment he was elected?

So many of our leaders carry a heavy burden of mendacity and avarice. If they instead got in touch with their own souls (perhaps by exposure to the natural world), or made their decisions by maximizing the amount of good that results, our leaders might find real meaning and value in their lives.

Until that happens, the only way to straighten out the current mess is to demand accountability and impose penalties on unethical/dishonest leaders. Both political parties enjoy bounteous hors d'oeuvres from Pharma's table, making it unlikely the existing political "process" will provide relief--as we've seen in the demoralizing healthcare reform drama.

Until then, I'll continue to "call it as I see it" in this blog -- working and living the way life should be, in rural Maine, far from the centers of power.

Ellen Byrne has created several designs encapsulating aspects of the FBI's ridiculous case against Bruce Ivins. They can be purchased on T-shirts and coffee mugs. All proceeds will be donated to the the Frederick County chapter of the American Red Cross, a favored charity of Dr. Bruce Ivins.